Eliza Douglas
at Overduin & Co.

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Eliza Douglas, Untitled (installation view) (2021). Oil on canvas, 82.75 x 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co.

Walking into Orgy of the Sick, Eliza Douglas’ recent exhibition of paintings, was like wading into a dirty bedroom and kicking up last week’s laundry, the colors and shapes swirling into a meaningful mass without forming a cohesive image. Douglas’ new series of paintings depict T-shirts emblazoned with icons and characters from pop culture—Disney, Sailor Moon, NASCAR—in a rumpled and discarded state, and like your favorite clothes, each painting feels instantly nostalgic and endearing. Walking through the show, I was transported to the graphics of my youth: my 101 Dalmatians bed sheets, my felted unicorn poster, my Sailor Moon manga. All of these things have since been crumpled and thrown away, lost and baled in a landfill.

Orgy of the Sick’s appeal comes mostly from the nostalgic aura emanating from these symbols. The hyperrealistic paintings feature depictions of graphic T-shirts that are wrinkled in ways that sharply cut off, distort, or obscure significant portions of their design. There’s a thrill to recognizing logos or characters within these warped visual cues—that you can recognize Mickey Mouse from a few black curves on his iconic head or identify Sailor Moon from one enormous eye is a testament to the power of consumer culture. 

Yet, even if the Sailor Moon paintings at first appeal to viewers via the nostalgia of Serena’s iconic pigtail buns, there’s an uneasiness that comes from seeing beloved characters in such grotesque configurations. In one of the untitled paintings (all works 2021), twisted fabric creates a whirlpool that deforms the heads of Mickey Mouse, Minnie, and Goofy, transforming them into one-eyed, noseless creatures. These new monsters are perhaps “the sick” referred to in the show’s title—preying on the consumer’s psyche to turn a profit, just as capitalism exploits our desire to be part of a community by forming affiliations with beloved characters and brands. By painting an allegory for the relationship between corporation and fandom, a cyclical orgy that fuels an excessive production of consumer goods, Douglas presented an indictment of mass culture, rather than a celebration of it.

The most fascinating works in the show, however, are not those that feature recognizable fan characters, but ones that depict images of dragons and wolves. These, along with a Virgin Mary tee, tap into a popular alt-aesthetic of the ’90s and early aughts: fantastical landscapes with illustrated creatures and dark symbols. Skeleton warriors wield swords while they ride atop dragons; enormous wolves bare bloody fangs over an indecipherable carcass. The dragon shirts in particular bring up memories from middle school, evoking a niche type of juvenile renegade who thrived on WWE and Slipknot. More poignant than the archetype these shirts evoke is the fact that there’s not a media conglomerate attached to their artwork. They’re off-brands inspired by the general metal graphics of the era, and their origins are diffuse—there’s no one company that has built an empire off the ’90s dragon shirt. (The Mountain Corporation, which produces the Three Wolf Moon shirt, is the only distributor that comes to mind.) Douglas’ inclusion of these types of shirts puts them in the same category as Disney, but it muddles her critique, conflating capitalistic excess with a condemnation of bad taste.

Losing track of the message may be unintentional, but a certain type of obfuscation is baked into Orgy of the Sick. Douglas purposely arranges her compositions to cut off any didactic text that could add specific meaning to the graphic tees. In a large painting of a wrinkled Virgin Mary T-shirt, beams of light brushed in long, globby strokes surround the Madonna, emanating from a fold that obscures her normally sorrowful face. Depicting the ebbs and flows of the wrinkled shirt, Douglas purposefully garbles whatever slogan accompanied this commodification of faith. With just enough revealed to make the shirt’s design recognizable—the viewer’s personal association with the media becomes more important than any specific brand or messaging that appears on the clothing.

In Orgy, many of the paintings were hung from the ceiling with silver chains, allowing them to be viewed from both sides and exposing Douglas’ large, scrawled signature on the back of each canvas, like the tag on the back of a T-shirt. The signature becomes a type of transference as Douglas asserts her own voice within this trifecta of cultural symbol, consumer, and producer. Orgy of the Sick then straddles between the lambasting of consumer culture, a glorification of fan art, and the insistence on personal autonomy within capitalist structures. By distorting and layering the tees in her crowded paintings, Douglas highlights the excess that is produced by corporations via the exploitation of consumer emotion—a wasteful ecosystem in which capitalism tempts consumers to memorialize feelings with physical objects. The desire is fleeting, but the production is permanent. Yet, as she folds herself into the complexities of consumer cycles, Douglas claims ownership over brand images, distorting and softening the power of corporate dominance, even if for just a moment. 

This review was originally published in Carla issue 26. 

Eliza Douglas, Orgy of the Sick (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co.

Eliza Douglas, Orgy of the Sick (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co.

Eliza Douglas, Untitled (installation view) (2021). Oil on canvas, 82.75 x 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co.

Eliza Douglas, Untitled (2021) Oil on canvas, 82.75 x 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co.

Renée Reizman is an interdisciplinary curator, artist, and writer. Working within diverse communities, she studies the ways infrastructures shape our culture, policy, and environment. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Vice, Teen Vogue, and more.

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